Dear Friends,
Thirty-seven people registered for the 2nd NFSI Workshop in Marine Seismology to be held May 22-26, 2023, in Halifax. Thank you for your interest and enthusiasm, we plan to make it a memorable event! Registration is now closed. We will send an updated workshop program in early March.
An extreme cold snap hit Halifax on the first weekend in February, with the temperature falling to -25 C. In my (Mladen’s) 17 years in Halifax, temperatures have never gone below about -16 C, so we were not prepared for such extremes. As the transponders built into the instruments are rated to -20 C for storage, and the instruments are in unheated containers, we had to act quickly to find a way of protecting them. We did this by purchasing oil-filled electrical space heaters for the containers, powered through long extension cords from one of the COVE buildings. While these provided only minimal heating in uninsulated containers, added to the thermal mass of the instruments we estimated they would be sufficient to prevent the temperature inside the containers from dropping below the rated limit. Fortunately, the period of extreme cold lasted only 24 hours so we are hopeful that the instruments are fine, which is what visual inspection of the transponders seems to indicate.
A second long-term test of our OBS instruments started on February 11, 2023, when a team from Guralp deployed 4 instruments offshore the island of Ischia, near Naples, Italy. To resolve problems with hydrophone data that had compromised results from the Laurentian Fan deployments, these instruments were deployed with a range of hydrophone gain settings. Guralp reports that preliminary assessment of hydrophone data, offloaded acoustically shortly after deployment, suggests that they are giving good data, which is a great relief. These instruments are scheduled to stay down for a minimum of 3 months, with recovery expected around mid-May.
On the project front, cruise dates for the first year of deployments of 30 instruments on the west coast of Canada are now locked to October 4-28, 2023.
Our ad for a Marine Instrument Technologist closed at the end of January with 33 applications netted. Following interviews, a candidate has been selected who we feel will be a strong addition to our team, and we are now working with HR to finalize a formal offer.
Best,
Mladen, Graeme and Pascal